Today was a fantastic day but an awful Christmas. Christmas is a family holiday, and I was fortunate to spend it with Hannah who’s like family, but it’s just not the same.

Here are some family traditions we kept:

-Hallway picture. My brother and I always take a Christmas Morning picture. It used to be at the top of the stairs and (I think) dates back to my dad’s childhood, but for the past several years we’ve done it at the end of the hallway because we lived in a ranch-style house and it made no sense to put the tree in the basement. Hannah took a picture of me in her hallway and I’ll photoshop it together with one of Brad (who seems to have no idea how tall I am).

-Tree picture. Hannah takes a picture by the Christmas tree, so I took one of her with this streamer tree she and Meredith put up in their kitchen.

-Santa picture. Hannah and her brother take a picture with a mall Santa every year and give it to their mom on Christmas morning. Well, Hannah had her picture taken with Ded Moroz (the first word sounds like “dead” and the second sounds like “morose,” but in Russian it’s “Grandfather Frost,” the closest thing to Santa) but picture wasn’t on her camera and the person who was supposed to mail it to her hadn’t yet, so we photoshopped her into the picture her brother had gotten with Santa. Poor guy. He had to stand alone in a long line of children to get the picture. I wasn’t very proud of the photoshopping, but the story goes Hannah’s mother cried a little she was so happy to get her annual picture, especially since she had resigned herself to not having one this year.

-Christmas story. Both Hannah’s family and mine read the Christmas Story from the Bible every year before opening presents. We sometimes do Matthew, sometimes Luke, but Hannah’s family always does Luke 2, so that was the version we went with.

-Presents. Hannah and I each had a little something for each other, but even more importantly we both had something to open from home. Hannah had two cards from her grandmother and I had a nicely wrapped present from my dad that I knew was a book (I had it under the tree and Judith scolded me for saying I knew it was a book—that ruined the fun of it being a wrapped present and therefore a mystery. I explained that my dad gave me a book every year, a tradition, but that I had no idea what book it might be). Well, I opened it and found I was a little off. There was a book, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, but there was also a letter and tucked into the pages were various CDs. Deviating from the normal tradition, Hannah and I both cried a little.

In the afternoon, we took a taxi to an “open air museum” near Izhevsk. It’s a site preserved from pre-revolutionary times. Our tour started with a traditional Udmurt meal, including lots of cabbage, potatoes, and a spongy pancake with dipping sauce, complete with obligatory samagon straight from the kettle that we Americans were happy to sip at but our host insisted we down quickly for our health, and so that she could refill our glasses. We finished up with some tea then set out into the cold.

Hannah, Meredith, and I thought we’d take advantage of the bathroom before the tea and samagon caught up to us, but the bathroom was an outhouse and even the freezing cold didn’t cut the smell, so we passed. In the courtyard outside the building where they served food we found a group of children had gathered. They sang the standard New Years’ song V Lesu Rodilas Yolochka, or “The Christmas Tree was Born in the Forest,” in different animal voices then the kindly old women who had prepared our meal sprang from the building we’d eaten in, all dressed up in monster costumes, and began chasing the kids. I have no idea what tradition that was.

It was about -16 Celsius outside (or 3 degrees Fahrenheit) so our ten minute walk over to the settlement was long enough for the top of my scarf to freeze. Everything sparkled in the sunlight and almost all of the snow we saw was pristine, without a single footprint. Sometimes we walked under branches and knocked off a shower of diamonds.

We started with the summer lodging, a windowless bedroom built over the stable to trap heat. We then saw a workshop store-room (where I was impressed by the variety of things one can make with wood) before moving on to the sanctuary. The sanctuary was a dark room with benches along the wall and a place for a fire in the middle. Here offerings would have been made to the pagan gods even after Orthodoxy came to the area.

After the sanctuary, or temple, I’m not sure what the proper term is, we saw some of their sleds then went into the main house where during winter everyone lived together. This room actually had windows and was much more elaborate than all the other spaces. Our guide told a story from years before when the museum had recently opened and an old man came on a tour and broke down crying when he saw the dwelling because they had renovated it exactly as it should be, without embellishment. He had been the youngest child of 12 (or some large number) in the last family that lived there. This was how I understood the story, anyway.

Connected to the main living space was another room with an elaborate loom and other items that looked useful. Around this point my toes felt ready to fall off (although we were indoors for most of the tour, none of the rooms were heated which made it colder than outside where at least we had had the sun).

Hannah and Meredith did a bit of marching to warm up and then we headed back in the direction we’d come. The children we’d seen before, having eaten, were sledding and playing around gleefully outside, clearly warmer than we were. We shuffled into the dinning room and downed more steaming samagon, bought some mittens (both as souvenirs and as insurance for the next time we spent so long outside), and went back to our waiting taxi.  In total, we were out in the cold for an hour or maybe an hour and a half stretch. The taxi only charged us about twenty dollars for the whole thing: half an hour there and back and a two and a half hour wait in between.

In the evening Meredith had a goodbye party so I got to spend some time chatting with some of the professors I met yesterday. I also got out my guitar so Hannah and I could try singing a few hymns. The only one we really managed was Silent Night, which the German teachers then sang in German. After that we switched to Russian songs like Kalinka and the aforementioned V Leso Rodilas Yolochka.

Later, after everyone left, Hannah and I called our families. It was good to hear familiar voices, but frustrating trying to get a connection, finding people not home, and running out of money on my phone. And so I ended Christmas waving at a computer screen even though I knew the web camera was broken and telling the family in Naperville that I loved them. Then we hung up and they set about opening presents while I went to sleep.

Photos from Christmas day, Photos of Christmas decorations